Amateur Electronics

Monthly Archives: January 2017

Lately I’ve been quite busy with the ESPurna firmware. It’s growing bigger and gaining some momentum. It’s really fulfilling to see other people using it and reporting back. But at the same time it’s very time consuming. Last Saturday I released version 1.5.0 with some new functionalities and bug fixes and I decided to use some of my free time over the weekend to work on a project that’s been waiting for a month in the shelf.

A few weeks ago I was playing with the Sonoff TH and I wrote a post about its sensor interface and the possibility of using lots of different digital sensors, including I2C sensors since the board can be easily hacked to export 2 digital pins over that interface.

And having I2C not only increases the number of potentially usable sensors but also opens the possibility of using I2C Analog to Digital converters to overpass the lack of analog inputs in the device. Here it comes the Texas Instruments ADC121 (datasheet), an 12-bit precision ADC with I2C support priced 2.74€ in quantities of 1.

Last December Itead Studio updated their Home Automation product line with a new and different product. The main difference is that it doesn’t have a relay and it’s mainly sensors and no actuator (if we don’t define a notifying LED as an actuator). The Sonoff SC is a sensor station that packs a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, a GM55 LDR, an electret microphone with an amplifier circuit and a Sharp GP2Y1010AU0F [Aliexpress] dust sensor in a fancy case that looks like it was originally meant for a speaker.

The device is packs an ESP8266 as expected and is compatible with the eWeLink app. But, such a collection of sensors, with 3 of them having analog interfaces, cannot be run from the single-ADC ESP8266 so Itead has thrown in a good old ATMega328P to drive the sensors and report the Espressif with the data.